Yahoo! apps! showcase! makes! social! media! moves!

Yahoo!’s annual Project Runway new-product event has seen the introduction of several skinny bits of software and one plus-size model: Livestand – an iPad app designed to present you with content based on your personal whims.

Livestand uses HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to build a news reader, in part generated from Yahoo’s own data, but also from around 100 other media sources. It’s based around the company’s C.O.R.E. (content optimization relevance engine) technology, aimed to distribute content across multiple devices wirelessly.

Users can tag articles within Livestand to get more of the same, and there’s a personalization service dubbed Yahoo! Today, which will cover push items such as stocks, weather, and TV listings. A version of the application for Android is in the works, Yahoo! tells The Register, and is due out in the first half of 2012.

All this comes at a price however. Yahoo! is looking to pay for it by offering advertisers a “first-of-its-kind immersive, interactive, and adaptable digital ad that uses video to increase engagement and take full advantage of the tactile and motion-sensing capabilities of tablets.” Presumably this means that you’ll be looking at a lot of footage of the Prius v, since Toyota has signed up for an ad campaign around the launch, and Yahoo! will also be keen to get its Interclick investment working on the platform.

For those that want even more personalization, the new IntoNow iTunes app promises to monitor what you are watching on TV, be it in real time or recorded shows. It’ll then display relevant content – the thinking being that since tablets are often used by TV viewers, Yahoo! can push what it estimates is relevant content their way. Yahoo Mail also has an iPad app to integrate its email into all this.

"Tablets are profoundly changing how we interact with media and Livestand captures that shift in a deeply personal and imaginative new experience," said Blake Irving, chief product officer at Yahoo! in a statement. "No one does personalization better than Yahoo!. The technology behind Livestand, combined with its stunning design and fantastic variety of content, redefines what digital media can be."

The only Android app on view at Project Runway is a Yahoo! Weather application that adds in local Flickr content. The iPad may have a crushing market share at the moment, but El Reg wishes Yahoo! had been a little more subtle about that fact.

Yahoo! also has the social bug, and showed off a set of tools that allow people to share and discuss the latest buzz. These include the sinister-sounding Social Sentiment Slider, which shows what brands are being discussed by which groups of people. Looking ahead, this should be integrated into Livestand fairly shortly. ®